Ursula Haverbeck, 89, was jailed for two years for denying the Holocaust, a crime in Germany. However, she failed to report to prison last week, prompting a search for her. Haverbeck has repeatedly said the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was simply a work camp and has been convicted several times, but had avoided prison due to lengthy appeals. She was found by authorities at her home in Vlotho, a town in central Germany. It was not clear when she returned home.
She has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and been through the court system. Previously, she published an article in neo-Nazi magazine Stimme des Reiches (Voices of the Reich) in which she denied the holocaust. Presiding judge Joachim Lotz told Haverbeck Wetzel in 2016: ‘And we do not have the expectation that you will stop.’ Haverbeck-Wetzel was sentenced in November 2016 to two and a half years in prison, which the Verden court reduced on appeal to two years because of her old age. In the article she argued that Auschwitz was a labour camp, and not the Nazi death camp in which an estimated 1.1 million Jews and other people deemed undesirable by the Nazis were gassed. Her husband, Werner Georg Haverbeck, had a position in the Nazi’s national leadership during World War II. After the war, the couple still openly preached their far-right views and had close ties with several neo-Nazi groups.
